Anzia Yezierska

In America, a female sweatshop worker from a Polish shtetl could become a renowned writer and Hollywood commodity.

By mixing fractured English with Yiddish, Anzia Yezierska brought her readers into the world of the Jewish immigrant. Because of the semi-autobiographical nature of her work, critics have lauded her writings as important social histories, though some scholars have questioned the quality of her prose. The following article is reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

 

Called during her few years of fame "Cinderella of the Sweatshops," Anzia Yezierska developed a prose style inflected with Yiddish to give the mark of authenticity to her impassioned fiction about the struggles of Jewish immigrant women.

 

Yezierska, the youngest of nine children, was born in the shtetl Plinsk, near Warsaw, around 1885. Before 1898, the 15‑year‑old Anzia, her father, mother, and siblings came to New York, joining her eldest brother, Meyer, who had arrived several years before. Meyer's name had been changed by immigration officials to Max Mayer, and the entire family assumed the new last name as well, Yezierska taking the first name Harriet or Hattie. She reclaimed her own name only when she was in her late twenties. According to her daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, Yezierska herself was never certain of her birth date and, during her period of fame, recast her life repeatedly, changing the dates to make herself seem younger than she was.

 

Yezierska's family lived in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side, where her father studied the sacred texts, while her mother, working as a menial, supported the family. In contrast to her brothers, whom her parents encouraged to pursue higher education, Yezierska had only two years of elementary school before she went to work in sweatshops and factories and as a domestic.

 

Her sisters married early, but conflicts with her father, whose traditional values and ways she scorned, led Yezierska to move into the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, a residential trade school for young immigrant Jews founded in 1897 by well‑meaning "uptown" German Jews. There Yezierska found a way to continue her education, according to her daughter, for at age 18 or 19 she won a four‑year scholarship to Columbia University, inventing a high‑school diploma she did not possess and promising her patrons at the East Side settlement house that she would study domestic science to benefit the Jews. Despite her official concentration at Columbia's Teachers College (1901‑1905), she read poetry and philosophy, and honed her English to a refined elegance by memorizing 19th‑century Romantic poetry. From 1908 to 1913, she taught elementary school and briefly attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts.

 

Yezierska married in 1910 but immediately annulled the marriage. In 1911, she married again, a schoolteacher and textbook writer. In 1912, their daughter was born. During a marital crisis in 1913, Yezierska wrote her first short story, The Free Vacation House, an angry work about how charity imprisons its recipients; it was published in 1915. She left her husband and moved to San Francisco with their daughter in 1916, divorcing him that same year. Their daughter eventually lived with her father.

 

After doing social work, Yezierska returned to New York to teach again and met John Dewey, a world‑famous authority on education and a professor at Columbia. During 1917 and 1918, the immigrant Jew and the Yankee developed a passionate but unconsummated relationship, and he encouraged her to write and publish. In All I Could Never Be (1932) and Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), Yezierska fictionalized their love as an ideal joining of two cultures that proves disillusioning. This story of the Gentile mentor and suitor became a prototype that recurred throughout her works, as Yezierska examined the transformation of creative immigrant women from greenhorns to Americans.

 

When, after repeated rejections, her short story The Fat of the Land was accepted for publication and named the best short story of 1919 by noted editor Edward O'Brien, Yezierska became famous. Houghton Mifflin published her first collection of short stories, Hungry Hearts, in 1920, of which Samuel Goldwyn took note. The film mogul brought Yezierska to Hollywood as a screenwriter and produced a silent movie, Hungry Hearts, in 1922. Although Goldwyn offered her a $100,000 contract to write screenplays, she felt stymied in Hollywood and returned to New York.

 

Yezierska subsequently published another collection of short stories, Children of Loneliness, as well as her first novel, Salome of the Tenements, in 1923. A silent film based on this novel was directed by Sidney Alcott in 1925, the same year that she published Bread Givers,which, decades later, became her most famous novel. Arrogant Beggar came out in 1927 and All I Could Never Be in 1932.

 

During the depression, the Works Progress Administration's Writers Project gave Yezierska the trivializing task of cataloguing the trees in Central Park. For the next two decades, she published articles, essays, and book reviews, but only in 1950 did she publish another book, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, an autobiography that her daughter calls fiction. Although she had fallen into obscurity, Yezierska continued to write powerful stories about the vicissitudes of old age. She died in 1970 in California. With the advent of the women's movement in the United States, feminist scholars and others have revived interest in Yezierska's works, and all of her books have been reissued.